The Map is a quarterly newsletter of useful information in quick-read format for business people seeking ways to improve their bottom line.

This publication is produced by Gail Finger of Finger Consulting, Laurie Breitner of Breitner & Associates, and Jeanne Yocum of Tuscarora Communications, Ltd. Drawing on decades of professional experience, these business owners and their guest authors target their message to the needs of other business owners and leaders.

The goal of The Map is to provide information that will help you:

• Become more competitive and profitable
• Work more effectively and successfully
• Create harmony and energy in your organization
• Manage significant change

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The Map includes information appropriate for a general audience. However, use of these opinions is no substitute for legal, accounting, investment and other professional services tailored to your specific organizational needs.

COPYRIGHT © 2003

Is Your Business Taking Control of You? by Laurie C. Breitner

Do the day-to-day demands of your business leave little time for strategic planning? If so, your business may be controlling you instead of the other way around.

Clearly defining your vision, mission, goals and objectives, steps in strategic planning, help both leaders and employees establish priorities, make sound decisions and work effectively. These are all keys to long-term business success…and to establishing control of your business.

Bain & Company, an international consulting company, puts it this way, "A Mission Statement defines the company’s business, its objectives, and its approach to reach those objectives. A Vision Statement describes the desired future position of the company. Elements of Mission and Vision Statements are often combined to provide a statement of the company’s purposes, goals, and values."

Does this sound complicated? It doesn’t have to be. Here are steps to get you started:

• Define what you hope your organization will ultimately become, your vision. Whether you aspire to being the international market leader in sports drink sales or the best fresh juice stand on Main Street, you need to know where you’re going for two important reasons - first, to guide your progress and second, to know when you’ve arrived.
  
  
• With a clear destination in mind, define your mission. At the simplest level, it’s a clear, concise statement that says what your organization is and does, for whom and where. Often mission statements include company values. Our hypothetical juice stand, Your Main Squeeze, might define its mission as follows:

• Thoroughly and objectively assess the current state. This exercise is often called a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats). Evaluate your organization’s relative strengths and weaknesses. For example, Your Main Squeeze might have excellent sources for fresh, all natural fruits and vegetables, but lack sufficient space to expand operations. Examine current market projections and business climate; define your competition and target market. Make three sets of projections – ones that assume good, static and declining economic conditions. Write down your assumptions! Later, when reviewing what worked and what didn’t, you’ll need to consider how those assumptions impacted outcomes.
  
  
• Develop your plan. Look for ways to maximize your strengths, shore up your weaknesses, take advantage of opportunities and mitigate risks. Establish goals (targets) and objectives (clear, measurable, time-bound statements that describe what will be accomplished). Identify important milestones and the dates by which you expect to achieve them. An essential element of a good plan is periodic evaluation and revision. Evaluate progress at regular intervals and make mid-course corrections.
  
  
• Evaluate whether you have the resources to meet your plan. Financial projections satisfy yourself and your investors or lenders that your organization has adequate resources to make success possible. As you consider potential funding sources, remember that each has trade-offs. Venture financing fuels growth, but leads to loss of control and implies an exit strategy of selling the company or going public. Debt service on loans adds to expenses. Owner financing may mean slower growth, and suggests pursuing smaller targets (niches) sheltered from competition.

Laurie Breitner helps businesses on the road to success through strategic planning, organizational development, project management, operational improvement and technical and process documentation. http://www.breitnerandassociates.com/

So you've done what every successful business needs to do and developed a great strategic plan. Now it’s time to make that plan happen. Where do you start? With great internal communication directly from you, the leader. Everyone in your organization needs to understand your strategic plan and his/her role in making it a reality. And the person they most want to hear this information from is you, the leader.

Two of my clients, David Frances of EAP Systems, in Woburn, MA, and Mitch Bornstein of Wellesley Consulting, in Wellesley, MA, are experts in helping leaders improve their leadership communication skills. According to Dave and Mitch, two key benefits of having consistent communication about strategic direction come directly from the leader to all organizational levels are:

• Your goals and strategies are embraced. People highly value hearing what you are thinking, without getting the message through several layers of intermediaries, off a sheet of paper, or from a computer screen.
  
  
• People give their best to a leader who takes the time to communicate directly with them. You don’t need charisma. Just being there, in front of people, speaking openly and honestly, with enthusiasm, about the direction you want to take the company with their help has a huge and immediate positive impact. Interacting with people directly tells them you care enough about them to make the effort.

Mitch and Dave also point out that with face-to-face communication that provides for a two-way exchange of ideas and information, you learn a lot that will help you strengthen your chances of making your strategic plan succeed. For instance, you will:

• Find out what is going on inside your organization. If you’re frequently surprised by the lack of progress toward key goals, you probably don’t have your finger on the pulse of your organization. The best and simplest way to learn what’s really happening out there—and why—is to just go out there and talk to people. You can do all the employee surveys you want and spend hours trying to interpret exactly what the answers mean. Or you can regularly devote an hour here and there to talking with people. You’ll be amazed at how much you’ll learn about why things are working (or not working).
  
  
• Understand more about what’s going on outside your organization that’s impacting your business. As Intel CEO Andy Grove explained in Only the Paranoid Survive, senior managers are often the last to sense what he calls Strategic Inflection Points. These are unexpected and rapid business shifts that can dramatically change a company’s operating climate. As he puts it, "People in the trenches are usually in touch with impending changes early. Salespeople understand shifting customer demands before management does; financial analysts are the earliest to know when the fundamentals of a business change." The more time you spend talking to people who work on the periphery of the business—those who are actually dealing with customers, vendors, and even competitors—the more you’ll know about the outside influences that are poised to cause you problems.
  
  
• Build a cohesive team. Who do you think has a better chance of turning their entire organizations into unified, motivated teams: Leaders who rarely interact with anyone but the people who report directly to them or leaders who frequently go throughout the organization, engaging informally with others, communicating the goals and strategies, and asking for feedback and new ideas?

If you want people to feel part of your team and to be committed to your strategic direction, you need to show them that you too are part of that team and that you are passionate about where you want to take the company. The most effective way to do this is with frequent face-to-face communication.

(Contact information on article sources: David Frances, EAP Systems, dfrances@aol.com; Mitch Bornstein, Wellesley Consulting, mbornstein@wellesleyconsulting.com)

Jeanne Yocum, president of Tuscarora Communications, Ltd., has over 20 years' experience in planning and implementing corporate communications and public relations programs. She has worked with clients in a wide variety of fields, including commercial and residential real estate, retailing, health care, financial and legal services, manufacturing, IT analysis, management consulting, architecture, and banking. She also writes book proposals and ghostwrites business books. http://www.yourghostwriter.com/

Each organization has its own distinct culture, i.e., the underlying beliefs, values and assumptions that drive how work gets done. In the past, attempts to describe company culture have produced results that were more academic than practical. But now there is a way to describe and measure your company culture, and the impact it is having on your bottom line.

To make the concept of "business culture" relevant to business leaders, there had to be a way to measure it and link it with bottom line performance measures such as return on investment (ROI), sales growth, quality, innovation and employee satisfaction. Fifteen years of research by Dr. Daniel Denison, PhD., professor of Organizational Development at IMD (International Institute of Management Development in Lausanne, Switzerland), culminated in the Denison Organizational Culture Survey and the Denison Leadership Development Survey. Denison asserts that elements of culture are manifested in a set of behaviors. Since these behaviors are observable, Denison was able to develop a tool to measure company culture.

Nine hundred and fifty businesses (of divergent sizes and sectors) participated in the development of the Denison culture model, which measures the following four basic business culture traits:

• Mission – Is the company clear about why they exist and where they are going?
• Involvement – Do employees embrace the defined mission, can they see the link between their jobs and the mission, and are they willing to give their all to achieve it?
• Adaptability – Do employees fully understand the needs of their customers and are they able to respond to changing marketplace demands?
• Consistency – Are efficient and effective systems, structures, and processes in place to maintain focus on the mission?

Strong revenue and sales growth correlate with high scores on mission and adaptability. In an article by Caroline Fisher, PhD, entitled "Like It or Not, Culture Matters – Linking Culture to Bottom Line Business Performance" (Employee Relations Today, John Wiley & Sons, 27:2, Summer 2000) she states "Mission alone, as a single cultural factor, impacts the greatest number of bottom-line performance measures in a company." Therefore, every company leader would do well to ensure that each person in his/her employ understands why the company exists and where it is headed.

High performing companies – those having an ROI of 30% – score high in all four areas. Low performing companies – those with an ROI of 9%, scored poorly in all four areas. Comparisons like these are available on Denison’s website (http://www.denisonculture.com/).

I have had the opportunity to use both the Denison Organizational Culture Survey and the Denison Leadership Development Survey. The Leadership survey lets you know how your executives and managers are performing in the four key areas of mission, involvement, adaptability and consistency. This information is invaluable in helping you to identify where to invest your training and development dollars.

Both surveys can be taken easily, cost-effectively, and anonymously on-line. The report offers easy-to-read graphics and a breakdown of company performance in all four key areas. The report also provides suggestions for improving performance where it is needed. This tool not only helps businesses to assess why they are not reaching their financial goals, but can also be used to measure progress along the way so leaders can be confident about staying on track with fixes.

Company culture is no longer a purely academic concept with no real link to your bottom line. Now, tools exist to measure the behaviors associated with company culture, assess how your company compares to the most successful ones, and focus your resources in ways that will give you the greatest return.

Gail Finger is an organizational, leadership and management consultant with over 20 years of experience in the areas of human motivation, performance, and the psychology of change. She offers a wide array of services and programs that result in a highly motivated and productive workforce. They include leadership and management coaching, team development, succession and promotion planning, pre-employment assessments, and a variety of educational and experiential seminars. http://www.fingerconsulting.com/.

Select Marketing Initiatives that Add Value Now and in the Future
by Karen L. Utgoff

Most companies are faced with a dizzying array of options for reaching markets and customers. Typically, the total cost of all promising possibilities exceeds the budget available. Choosing among them can feel like comparing apples to orangutans. Is a basic web site more important than a better brochure? Should you send an additional mailing to existing customers or advertise to attract new ones? Would it be better to expand the product line or enter a new geographic region?

Below are three key questions to ask when considering new marketing initiatives or programs. Based on a strategic marketing perspective, they are designed to test how well a particular initiative fits within the structure of your marketing and sales plan, and to enable comparison with other options.

What is the quantifiable benefit to your company/line-of-business? Base this answer on objective analyses and information. Build your estimate on past experience and results as well as information about your industry, market, customers and competitors. Reuse and extend this knowledge as needed to estimate the importance and potential payoff of the initiative. Cite information and assumptions that were used in the estimate so that comparisons with other opportunities can be made.

Depending on your circumstances, a one to five year time frame may be appropriate. Estimates may include revenue growth, leads or customers to be gained, change in market share, increases in unit sales of key products or services, or how much business will be lost if the initiative is not undertaken.

How well is the initiative aligned with your objectives in your target market(s)? In most cases initiatives that are not focused on the target market(s) should be eliminated. Beyond this screening rule, is the proposed initiative essential because it matches what your competition is already doing? Will it help you gain an advantage by differentiating your company, product or service along an important dimension? Does it take advantage of existing trends in your target market or address an unmet need?

How well does the initiative support the underlying strategic goals of your business / marketing plan? The answer should rate an initiative on its potential to advance the company toward its long-term goals. For example, to extend your current geographic territory requires different programs than increasing market share within existing target market(s). At the tactical level, both may produce an increase in revenue while only one will move the company in its chosen direction.

If you are in the midst of your budgeting and planning season, objectively answering these three key questions for various marketing/sales initiatives will highlight those options that are especially strong along all three dimensions. Even if answering is beyond the scope of your effort this year, keep them in mind as you develop your 2004 marketing/sales action plan and budget. I think you will find that the perspective and insight gained will make the job of determining how to put scarce resources to work a bit more manageable.

Karen Utgoff, principal of Karen Lauter Utgoff Consulting, is a market-oriented business strategist. She earned her M.B.A. from the Wharton School and helps clients to develop thorough, fact-based, implementable business and marketing plans, frequently working on issues such as market segmentation, target market selection, differentiators, and market-based financial projections. Ms. Utgoff's experience spans diverse domains, including consumer products, bioinformatics, elevators, software, and technology commercialization. http://www.utgoff.com/